Sasha Barbagallo
speaker
629 appearances
7 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 28 Jul
Sasha Barbagallo’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 3.
Appearances
The Briefing · Hezbollah rejects ceasefire + The 60-year plan to make you love robots · 4 Jun 2026
podcast
Boy, was he wrong.
Within weeks, people were opening up to Eliza like it was an actual therapist, even though it was spitting out very basic replies like, It got to the point where Weizenbaum's own secretary, who knew exactly how Eliza was programmed, asked him to leave the room so she could have a private conversation with it.
Weisenbaum spent the rest of his life warning the world about what he'd stumbled onto, whereas the tech industry has spent every decade since exploiting it.
They even gave it a name, the Eliza effect, and that's our tendency to project real feelings and intelligence onto machines that sound human enough.
And the more human they get, the better.
All right, get back in the car because our next stop is the late 90s.
The year is now 1997.
Microsoft has just launched Clippy, that little animated paper clip with googly eyes.
It's the company's early attempt at an AI-powered assistant that would see what you were doing on your computer and try and suggest help.
He was intrusive, would pop up when you least wanted him to, was almost impossible to get rid of, and while some found him cute, he wasn't very good.
So Microsoft axed him in 2007, but Clippy walked so the AI assistants of today could run.
He had a name, a face, a gender, I've been referring to him as he, some personality and a little suggestion that he cared about you.
People responded to that.
Fast forward now to 2011 and Apple's holding a special event to launch its brand new intelligent assistant.
Amazon soon follows with Alexa, then comes Microsoft with Cortana, Google with Google Assistant.
They've all got names and they've all got female voices as the default.
Why?
It's a bias researchers had observed in phone operators since the early 1900s that was now being hard-coded into the assistant sitting in your pocket.
Alrighty, hop back in because we are off to 2016 where we hit a little bump in the road.
So there she was, Sophia, a robot that looks like a human woman.
Showing 301–320 of 629 · page 16 of 32
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